The House Where I was Born

First published in Pegasus and Other Poems in 1957, Day-Lewis also included this poem in his last collection, The Whispering Roots (1970). It was inspired by a picture his clergyman father used to hang in dark corners of the family home in the years after the premature death of Day-Lewis’s mother when he was just four. The Revd Frank Day-Lewis could not bring himself to speak about his grief at the loss of his young wife. The picture was Day-Lewis’s only reference to those early years.

Those, like Day-Lewis, who know their poetic canon, will recognise the reference in the title to the second line of Thomas Hood’s poem, sometimes called ‘Past and Present’, but popularly known as ‘I remember, I remember’.

An elegant, shabby, white-washed house
With a slate roof. Two rows
Of tall sash windows. Below the porch, at the foot of
The steps, my father, posed
In his pony trap and round clerical hat.
This is all the photograph shows.

No one is left alive to tell me
In which of those rooms I was born,
Or what my mother could see, looking out one April
Morning, her agony done,
Or if there were pigeons to answer my cooings
From that tree to the left of the lawn.

Elegant house, how well you speak
For the one who fathered me there,
With your sanguine face, your moody provincial charm,
And that Anglo-Irish air
Of living beyond one’s means to keep up
An era beyond repair.

Reticent house in the far Queen’s County,
How much you leave unsaid.
Not a ghost of a hint appears at your placid windows
That she, so youthfully wed,
Who bore me, would move elsewhere very soon
And in four years be dead.

I know that we left you before my seedling
Memory could root and twine
Within you. Perhaps that is why so often I gaze
At your picture, and try to divine
Through it the buried treasure, the lost life –
Reclaim what was yours, and mine.

I put up the curtains for them again
And light a fire in their grate:
I bring the young father and mother to lean above me,
Ignorant, loving, complete:
I ask the questions I never could ask them
Until it was too late.